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Wednesday, November 19, 2014

Runaway Trains and Moral Intuitions

A runaway
train hurtles towards 5 people tied to a track. A railroad switch
sits just a few feet from you. Flipping the switch diverts the train to another
track. A single person is tied to this other track.

Do you flip the
switch?

If you're like most
people, you do. Surveys show that around 90% of respondents say
they'd flip the switch. Their reason? Better to save 5 at the expense of
1.

Now imagine the same
scenario: A train is bearing down on 5 people tied to a track. Only this time
you're standing on a footbridge above the track. Next to you stands a
fat man. If pushed, the fat man will fall to his death, blocking the train
and saving the 5 people behind him.

Do you push him?

Most people—75% to 90%,
depending on which surveys you believe—don't push the fat man.

But what happened to
the logic of saving 5 at the expense of 1? What changed?

Some argue the salient
difference between the two cases is emotional. In the abstract, you're okay with
killing someone by pulling a lever, but you don't like pushing anybody.
Not only wouldn't you push someone, you also think it's wrong for someone else
to push the fat man.

In both cases, you've
made a moral judgment or an evaluation of the rightness or wrongness of
a given action. Our life is full of moral judgments, though fortunately most
don't involve locomotive catastrophe.

The field of moral
psychology asks how we make moral judgments. On this question, there are
two competing views: rationalism and sentimentalism.

As the name
suggests, rationalists believe that individual reason plays the primary
role in forming moral judgments. According to rationalism, moral dilemmas
engage our reasoning process. We call to mind the facts of the situation and
reflect on the relevant principles. When our internal dialectic ends, we
render moral judgment.

While rationalists
exalt reason, sentimentalists are decidedly more pessimistic about
its role in moral decision-making. According to sentimentalists, reason is
like a puppet show with emotions pulling the strings. Or, as psychologist
Jonathan Haidt puts it, emotion is the "dog wagging its
rationalist tail.” He offers an alternative to the rationalist model of moral
decision-making: the Social Intuitionist Model (SIM).

Like
all sentimentalists, Haidt believes that the majority of our moral judgments
are driven by emotional intuitions or instincts, not reasoned deliberation.
However, he introduces a new dimension to the discussion: social vs. private
decision-making.

According to Haidt, our
moral intuitions are rarely formed in a vacuum of private reflection.
Instead they are formed interpersonally. As social creatures, we look to
each other for clues about what to believe or how to act. A kind of finger
in the air. We are so adept at this that we often don't realize we are
aggregating and internalizing our neighbors’ beliefs. Once our social intuition
is formed, reason acts like a “press secretary,” assuming the podium only
to justify our intuitions to others. This is the basic insight of the
Social Intuitionist Model: that social forces shape the emotions that
determine our moral judgments.

This is a brief sketch
of two competing positions in the field of moral psychology: rationalism and
sentimentalism. Which do you find more compelling? Would you flip the switch
but not push the fat man? Why or why not?